Elizabeth Warren on the Government’s Hostage Tactics on Birth Control (Video)

Posted on Oct 1, 2013

As the government was on the verge of shutting down, the Massachusetts Democrat began her speech on the Senate floor Monday by exclaiming she was in a “state of disbelief.” After a litany of the dismal conditions the country will face during a government shutdown in an “economic recovery still far too fragile,” Warren says angrily, “Republicans have decided that the single most important issue facing our nation is to change the law so that employers can deny women access birth control coverage…in the year 2013. Not the year 1913—the year 2013.”

In other words, GOP, wake up and smell the democratic coffee. In the year 2013, women have rights, and one of these rights, upheld by U.S. law, is the ability to obtain contraception without fear of excessive costs that have led women to make choices about their bodies based on money rather than health. The inimitable Warren declares, “I have a daughter and I have granddaughters, and I will never vote to let a group of backward thinking ideologues cut women’s access to birth control. We have lived in that world and we are not going back. Not ever.”

She adds that these ridiculous threats may continue, but they will not change the reality of American democracy, in which the law is the rule of the land. And that law includes the Affordable Care Act. Republicans, she reminds us, are merely desperate, grasping at straws because they’ve failed to win elections or pass the outdated laws they’ve proposed. Because “hostage tactics are the last resort for those who can’t otherwise win their fights through elections, can’t win their fights in Congress, can’t win their fights for the presidency, and can’t win their fights in courts.”

And as long as Warren is in the same rink, fighting back, keeping the best interests of American women and men in mind, Republicans will not prevail with their cheap shots and childish tantrums. Not ever.